In today's computerized world, an increasing number of tasks are solved using networks of computers. In these cases, a user operating a computer connected to a network of computers such as the Internet, is able to access data stored on an arbitrary computer that is also connected to the network. A user may, for example, retrieve information from another computer connected to the network located at an arbitrary location or may retrieve an application program for execution. The user may also wish to send data stored on his computer to another computer at some other location in the network.
In a scenario where a large number of computers are connected in a network, it is conceivable that applications for storing, generating, processing and manipulating data, visualization, or similar activities are not locally executed on a client data processing device, but are executed on another computer that is connected to the network, wherein the execution of this application may be controlled through the client computer. For example, in Internet mail applications (e-mail), a user may access his mailbox through a client computer by logging on to a server hosting the user mailbox. After logging on to the server, the user can browse through e-mail messages, store and manipulate e-mail messages or send e-mail messages. In this case, the user's computer, i.e. client computer, generates and transmits instructions to the server which thereupon performs the desired operation. Thus, the e-mail application is executed at the server, while instructions controlling the application are generated at the client computer and screen contents are transmitted from the server to the client computer for local display.
In general, any application may be executed in the described way, i.e. remote from a client computer on a server computer. A server usually is a data processing device having large capacity for serving a number of client requests regarding the execution of applications for the users. However, in the case of a large number of client computers that desire to remotely run an application on a server, the capacity for serving client requests can become insufficient and lead to poor performance and high latency for users. Requests from clients may be evenly distributed over a given number of servers in order to distribute the processing load, however, this also has unsatisfactory results of poor performance and high latency.
Therefore, there is a need to improve over conventional systems.